Monthly Archives: November 2013

As a normal course of life, we are asked to routinely trust a diverse array of situational commands delivered by people we have never met, or machines we never wanted to. Yet we accept these often life changing commands as routine because we trust the source. More precisely, we choose to trust the source.

“In an emergency, the bags will drop from the ceiling above your head. Simply pull on the chord to start the flow of air. The bag may not inflate, but (TRUST ME) air will be flowing.” We are asked in an airplane emergency to trust that lifesaving air is actually in an empty bag. I’ve never heard anyone ask, “I don’t trust you – prove it.

You are driving your car towards a busy intersection, and the green light is shining in your direction. Other cars are approaching in a perpendicular path, but they SHOULD have a red light. You TRUST that the other cars will stop. We TRUST that the light is working properly and the other drivers see the light, know the law, and will obey it. We bet our lives on that scenario every day.

One more from the airlines. “In case of an unplanned water landing, use your seat cushion as a water floatation device.” My seat cushion is barely the size of my seat, and only two inches thick. I believe it will float in the Pacific Ocean, but I am to TRUST that the cushion will float with me holding on to it. Really? Yet here I sit in aisle 4 during a flight back home, TRUSTING that the aircraft, crew, and the Laws of Physics that we will land safely.

Billy, Eddie and John were like most 14 year old boys: endlessly hungry and dirty in the same moment, exhibiting the attention span equivalent to a sub-atomic particle and in possession of the inquisitive nature of the scientist who discovered it. They were ‘good boys’, a description often assigned by their mothers in the small Nebraska community where they lived. When they were bad, they would say so as well. Today, the three sat in Eddie’s garage throwing a tennis ball Billy had found in his sister’s gym bag. Billy had a knack for finding things in obvious places. In this game, they threw the ball to one another as quickly as they could, but each had to catch the ball one handed. Making the other guy’s hand hurt when he caught the tennis ball was always the ultimate goal of the game, but they only kept score by the number of times you missed a ball that should have been caught. Arguments over whether a ball was catchable were often and loud, a secondary benefit of playing this particular game.